There are some very naive views in this thread, about disability, about what that entails for a parent or a child.
When someone objects to 'full term' abortion because disabled children have a right to life too..
They're thinking about those neat, tidy, attractive disabilities, where a child can talk and laugh and play.. but may use a wheelchair or crutches or perhaps have a missing limb or two.
They're thinking about that child being raised by two loving parents in a comfortably well off home, with all the benefits they need to make life easier laid on at the drop of a hat, with access to all the care, education, equipment they need..
We're not talking about disabilities like that. We are not discussing the disability poster children who grow up to be independent, work in a nice office somewhere, perhaps become actors or actresses and feature on BBC or Channel 4 shows..
We're also not, when it comes to full term abortion, talking about those children who may not out live childhood, who will be non-verbal, non-communicative, have no mobility, have no bodily control whatsoever, whose parents will spend their entire lives guessing what they want, think, need, never knowing if their child is happy or trapped in a locked in hell.
We are talking about babies who will be born, screaming in agony (or unable to do so but still in agony) for whom every breath will be a fight. Babies whose organs are on the outside not the inside, or who developed without all the necessary organs or born already in severe organ failure, who are unable to survive outside the womb for very long, yet long enough to suffer and no we can't euthanise them like we would any other animal and we no longer put them in a side room to die quietly out of the way...
We're talking about babies for whom birth will be a brief, but intense hell, whose birth will give the mother PTSD, life long grief and guilt (because why couldn't THEIR body produce a normal, healthy baby)...
I ask you, who would wish a system that forces those babies to be born, and those babies and their parents to suffer that?
Being able to abort a fetus later than normal because a severe disability has shown up won't mean the world ends up with NO disabled people, because in reality very very few disabilities show up in scans and tests, compared to the number of causes of disability in living people!
I firmly believe the only reason anyone needs to have an abortion is 'I want an abortion'.
No child deserves to be born to someone who does not want that child.
That has to go double for a disabled child - do you WANT parents who do not want to BE parents, raising any child, let alone one with disabilities?
Can you please imagine what life is like as a child with one of any number of disabilities - repeated surgeries, repeated examinations, being encouraged to be 'good' every time you need to 'agree' to allow a doctor to do something painful, invasive or traumatic.
All those times you sit and have a conversation with your healthy small child about pants rules and what people can and can't do and you can say no to things you don't like, no one is allowed to hurt you...
Disabled children are frequenty co-erced to say yes to things that in any other context, children cannot consent to.
They feel they have to hide how scared they are, hide how much stuff hurts, agree to things they want to scream NO to, because to do otherwise is to let down the grown ups who are helping, the grown ups who care, the grown ups who are, even to a very small child, obviously scared and running themselves ragged trying to hold shit together.
Now imagine that without the support of loving parents - imagine that in a care setting where to not be 'good' will result in much worse than upset stressed out parents.